Wilson, Kansas
Early Sunday morning not only were almost no people out and about in the town of Wilson, but for the first time the incessant Kansas wind had let up a little. The heat wave was still in effect though, with the temperature not dropping below 70° overnight, and this was just May 27. The next theater on my list was in Dodge City, and the one after that in Medicine Lodge, too far for one day without rushing. So instead I decided to slow down and do as much "off topic" shooting as I could, ending up at Dodge City to do the drive-in and maybe other subjects there as well.
Wilson, Kansas
After the wind, the second thing I noticed in Kansas was that the color—of everything—seemed "off" to me. It was easy to see that the color of the native dirt was much more red than I'm used to, but other things like concrete pavement or bare metal or white painted surfaces all seemed to have a weird tint to them. Then I realized the sky itself looked "wrong."
Wilson, Kansas
This made me think that the color of the light might in fact be different. Whether there were clouds or not, the sky always looked veiled or hazy even if middle distances looked bright and crisp. Clouds didn't really look white, but a strange sort of blue/red tint. There may be an established cause for this difference in the light that I'm just not aware of, but something that occurs to me is that it could be connected to that constant battering wind. Maybe there's more particulate matter in the atmosphere, churned up by the constant gale. With dramatically lower humidity than I'm used to back home it didn't seem as though the hazy look to the sky would be from water vapor. I was keeping notes to identify the locations where pictures were made, so I began to add notations about my perception of the colors and what the sky looked like. Things like, "cloudless sky, but it looks dark and leaden, as much gray as blue." I figured this might be helpful later when I'd be working up the files for posting or printing.
Wilson, Kansas
6 comments:
wonderful 'sense of place'. love how you played with the foreground. as far as the color? maybe the constant wind just impregnated your eyeballs with red dust?....
Actually, there was very little dust. If there was a piece of farm equipment working in a field, or a pickup driving a dirt side road, you'd see a plume of dust, but otherwise the wind was weirdly dust-free. My guess is that the wind is so constant that anything loose has already been blown away.
Even if you don't sense dust, strong winds blow considerable dust into the air, sometimes at high altitudes. This dust may account for the change in the color of the light you saw.
Over the past two days you have documented the failure of gas stations from the 1930s through 2000s. This may be due to a decline in rural populations in the surrounding areas of these towns, a common problem across the entire Midwest.
TFG, one thing I noticed was that the housing stock was older than I'm used to seeing back east. Far fewer new houses. Of course my itinerary was anything but random--I was traveling where DI theaters survive. That means largely places where property values are low and there is little demand for commercial land.
As I look though more and more of these images, the lack of automobiles seems to stand out to me. It's kind of soothing to look at them without cars. They appear to be quiet places, at least in my mind.
Richard, thanks for the observation. Two things come to mind. First, there really were fewer cars around, both in town and out in the countryside, than I'm used to seeing back east. Second, I often make essentially the same picture with and without cars or other moving elements, then decide which I prefer during the editing process. For these pictures from the western plains, I find I generally prefer the shots without the cars.
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